I found some of this difficult but not impossible to understand, without any prior context. Of course, it’s possible that I’m wrong about my level of understanding, in which case I’d prefer to be corrected.
Here is my understanding of the relevant details.
Erfeyah is confused by what you mean by mana, and more specifically what it meant to “apply” mana to a rental car company employee. If my understanding is correct, this was a process of using emotional support techniques, as you describe them (or perhaps the opposite—introducing a “hostile social reality”, i.e. dark arts—this is something I’m not clear on), in order to accomplish your goals.
I’m also not sure what this means:
“You must sever your nerve cords. The Khala is corrupted”
Unless it means disconnecting your perception of social reality from your goal structure, while maintaining a surface-level awareness.
I also mean to imply the consequence of severing yourself from the Khala is profoundly disturbing isolation. It is done by deciding that no one is your ingroup or something like that, resulting in a feeling of stepping outside of a game containing all social interactions.
There’s a fine line between “this was a jargon term I’m introducing” and “this is a reference that helped me make sense of a thing that only really helps if you already knew the reference” and I think this was more of the latter.
Agreed. I think it can be fine to write in the language that comes naturally to you, with the references that are part of your native vocabulary, but it does confuse people sometimes. I usually put a wikipedia link to references that I don’t expect to be common knowledge but don’t want to stop to explain. (Videogames, or games generally, usually aren’t common knowledge; neither are technical or historical or literary references.)
I just googled it, it’s a StarCraft reference. The Khala is some psionic link between all members of this alien race that have submitted to it, and at some point a demon hijacks the Khala, and the members have to sever a nerve cord to destroy it.
When I was in college, I intuitively realized that severing myself from the Khala would have intellectual benefits, so I did. The problem was, the fruits of those intellectual benefits paid off socially, such that severing myself from the Khala seemed less and less attractive. Eventually, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I started to cash out. (I live with my partner who I met on the basis of my intellectual reputation. The most recent one, that is. There were a few.) My depression mostly disappeared, and I’d gotten myself an alright social life, but… I just couldn’t write anymore. And eventually I started to believe that my investment in high-variance strategies was misguided, and decided to ‘become a normie’.
It was only after I realized I’d succeeded that it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake.
But “severing myself from the Khala” isn’t quite the framing I’d use. It felt more like adopting a very high-variance strategy: there were a few people who greatly respected me and a few people who wanted to kill me, and to most people I was just illegible—not that I cared about any of that. In a low-variance strategy, no one wants to kill you, but no one (or at least very few people) respect you, until you’re old enough to have become respectable, to have gotten somewhere with the slow grind of life; and all your energy is consumed by the grind.
Most people who aren’t currently drawing juju from their respectability could stand to be higher-variance. If you’re intentionally sacrificing your own standing to make a point (and not to trade it in with more valuable standing from different people), you could stand to be lower-variance. There’s a golden mean there, but undershooting variance seems to be a much more common error than overshooting it.
I found some of this difficult but not impossible to understand, without any prior context. Of course, it’s possible that I’m wrong about my level of understanding, in which case I’d prefer to be corrected.
Here is my understanding of the relevant details.
Erfeyah is confused by what you mean by mana, and more specifically what it meant to “apply” mana to a rental car company employee. If my understanding is correct, this was a process of using emotional support techniques, as you describe them (or perhaps the opposite—introducing a “hostile social reality”, i.e. dark arts—this is something I’m not clear on), in order to accomplish your goals.
I’m also not sure what this means:
Unless it means disconnecting your perception of social reality from your goal structure, while maintaining a surface-level awareness.
Yes, something like that.
I also mean to imply the consequence of severing yourself from the Khala is profoundly disturbing isolation. It is done by deciding that no one is your ingroup or something like that, resulting in a feeling of stepping outside of a game containing all social interactions.
You still haven’t defined Khala.
There’s a fine line between “this was a jargon term I’m introducing” and “this is a reference that helped me make sense of a thing that only really helps if you already knew the reference” and I think this was more of the latter.
Agreed. I think it can be fine to write in the language that comes naturally to you, with the references that are part of your native vocabulary, but it does confuse people sometimes. I usually put a wikipedia link to references that I don’t expect to be common knowledge but don’t want to stop to explain. (Videogames, or games generally, usually aren’t common knowledge; neither are technical or historical or literary references.)
I just googled it, it’s a StarCraft reference. The Khala is some psionic link between all members of this alien race that have submitted to it, and at some point a demon hijacks the Khala, and the members have to sever a nerve cord to destroy it.
Oh, *that*.
When I was in college, I intuitively realized that severing myself from the Khala would have intellectual benefits, so I did. The problem was, the fruits of those intellectual benefits paid off socially, such that severing myself from the Khala seemed less and less attractive. Eventually, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I started to cash out. (I live with my partner who I met on the basis of my intellectual reputation. The most recent one, that is. There were a few.) My depression mostly disappeared, and I’d gotten myself an alright social life, but… I just couldn’t write anymore. And eventually I started to believe that my investment in high-variance strategies was misguided, and decided to ‘become a normie’.
It was only after I realized I’d succeeded that it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake.
But “severing myself from the Khala” isn’t quite the framing I’d use. It felt more like adopting a very high-variance strategy: there were a few people who greatly respected me and a few people who wanted to kill me, and to most people I was just illegible—not that I cared about any of that. In a low-variance strategy, no one wants to kill you, but no one (or at least very few people) respect you, until you’re old enough to have become respectable, to have gotten somewhere with the slow grind of life; and all your energy is consumed by the grind.
Most people who aren’t currently drawing juju from their respectability could stand to be higher-variance. If you’re intentionally sacrificing your own standing to make a point (and not to trade it in with more valuable standing from different people), you could stand to be lower-variance. There’s a golden mean there, but undershooting variance seems to be a much more common error than overshooting it.